DRIFTING
Buying a motorcycle with over 100 horsepower is kind of like buying a pound of coke. You’re basically saying to yourself, I’m just going to go ahead and be an asshole for the foreseeable future, and see what that’s like. What it is like is that the rest of the world is moving in slow motion, and it is excruciating. The lanes painted on the road appear acres wide. The enclosed, lumbering objects you share the road with are essentially standing still, and it makes no sense to abide by their rules.
Imagine you are Stephen Hawking and you wake up one day to discover that you have switched bodies with Stephen Curry. The life you have lived up to that point is no longer livable. However great the intellectual pleasures of black holes and equations, you suddenly have before you an unexpected cosmos that is deeply animal, an expanding universe that recedes from your present abilities and calls you forward: faster. Space-time dilates, and you are working in a different frame.
After seven years of riding a bike with 35 horsepower every day, I bought a modern Yamaha with about 120. It was roughly like going from an Irish donkey cart to something nuclear powered, with the precision of a Swiss watch. The acceleration was nearly hallucinogenic, the cornering scalpel-like.
A few months later I rode it down to Virginia International Raceway to watch races in various motor-sport disciplines that were crammed into a single weekend. I was creeping along North Paddock Road, shortly past the entrance to VIR, when I spotted a plume of smoke billowing into the heavy summer sky. It wasn’t a little smoke, it was a dense, rolling cumulus. That looks bad. I pictured a driver trapped upside down in a roll cage, frantically trying to activate a fire suppression system. But then it occurred to me that this smoke wasn’t black, as you would expect from a gasoline and plastics inferno; it was white. As I got closer to the action I could see that this was tire smoke, and that it is not the sign of a mishap but rather the main point of drifting.
Drifting is a motor sport in which one goes around corners sideways, tires spinning furiously. How sideways? The most acclaimed drivers sometimes take it to the point of entering a corner nearly backward, which has the visually elegant effect of prerotating the car, pointing it in the direction it will be headed as it exits a 180-degree turn. Picture a really excellent movie car chase and you’ll begin to get the idea. To watch two or three cars drifting in tandem, a few feet apart as they slide through a series of turns, is to learn that human beings have come up with a new form of dance. It might be the most beautiful thing that happens on four wheels.
But for the moment, I had some more pressing concerns of a personal nature. I was going to ride in one of these 1,000-horsepower beasts, and I didn’t want to soil myself. Some of the drivers appeared to be at the ragged edge; I really thought a red Nissan was going to lose it a number of times and go careening into the concrete barrier, but somehow the driver brought it back each time. The speed, the ground-shaking exhaust noise, the thick contrails of tire smoke, and above all the intensity of purpose that was evident in the driving made me wonder if I might have gotten in over my head.
Surely my driver would take it down a notch or two, having a civilian in the car? As I stood there sweating in jeans and boots and a bad case of helmet hair after the three-hour ride from Richmond, I signed a waiver that was too long to read—though my eyes did pick out the phrase “extremely dangerous.”
My driver, Forrest Wang, looked about twenty-five years old. He wasn’t wearing a fire suit, a Hans device (the standard neck restraint), or any such markers of prudence. He was wearing a T-shirt that mimicked the eponymous Run-DMC album cover, but instead read RUN 2JZ. (2JZ is an engine code.) This wasn’t Formula One. There were no “Fly Emirates” or Rolex banners draped across the track, and no medevac helicopter idling nearby. I asked: Forrest built his own roll cage. “That’s awesome!” I said, with less than perfect sincerity.
This would be a practice run, at an event that was not part of the Formula D points series, but with the same cohort of series competitors on track together. So while there were no standings (or sponsorship dollars) at stake, it was a collection of egos who were well-known to one another. All the established beefs were in play. The usual, secretive hardware adjustments were being tweaked in the various camps around the staging area, each with a couple of nylon tents to shield them from the Virginia sun. Forrest’s mom sat at one of these tents, selling T-shirts.
When the time came, Forrest helped me assemble, latch, and tighten the cams on the six-point harness that held me rigid against the deeply bolstered race seat. It was only at this moment that I remembered a little factoid about helmets. I was wearing my full-face motorcycle helmet. Motorcycle helmets are not allowed by automobile racing sanctioning bodies because they are not fire resistant. I entertained a vision of myself as a full-face burn victim and briefly entertained calling for a different helmet, but we were in the staging lane with three other cars. Their engines were running. A schedule of engine heat-soak and cool-down was being mentally monitored; laps remaining on the tires at current track temperatures being estimated. It was too late to raise helmet worries.
When I say, “Their engines were running,” that may suggest something like an idle, as at a stoplight. This was more like the barking, snorting, and stamping of rodeo bulls in the interval between the moment when the strap is mercilessly tightened against their scrotums and the moment when the gate is opened and they are allowed to take their best shot at dislodging their tormenters. A couple of seconds after the flagman dropped his flag and the first car launched onto the track, a very loud clunk emanated from under our car and resounded through the bare metal shell of the cabin, which was completely devoid of soft materials. Forrest had just dropped the transmission into first gear. He remarked that the sound was due to the “dogbox” sequential transmission, which allows very fast, hard shifts but dispenses with such niceties as the meshing of gears. It was mated to the chassis with solid metal mounts for maximum rigidity, without noise-absorbing rubber insulators. We lurched and inched our way up to where the flagman stood.
Our turn to enter the track came, and this was the moment I was most curious about. What would it feel like to accelerate in a two-thousand-pound car with 600 horsepower and big, sticky race tires?1 It feels . . . violent. The predominant sound came not from the open exhaust or the spooling turbo; it was the gear noise of the transmission, which sounds oddly like the high-pitched whine of a radio-controlled car.
I braced my feet against the footholds as we approached the first corner. It was a fairly sharp left. Forrest turned the wheel slightly to the right, then hard to the left while hard on the gas. The effect was to toss the rear out. Now he was countersteering toward the right as the car drifted through the left-hand turn, hands moving in a blur from the rapidly spinning steering wheel to the shifter and back. Drifting is a very different game than road racing. Road race instructors sometimes tell their students to slow their hands down. It is a mental/physical device to help them relax: don’t “chase speed,” let the track come to you, and let the car’s chassis dynamics determine the rhythm of your inputs. To exceed the limits of traction is to fail to go as fast as possible. In drifting, on the other hand, the driver uses the car’s dynamics to deliberately put it out of composure. Yet there is another level of composure that emerges from the mayhem. There was one sequence of corners that Forrest executed with a kind of liquidity that had me moaning in my helmet; it was a moment of pure aesthetic rapture.
In this regard, drifting is a curious form of motor sport. It is more like figure skating than speed skating. The contestants don’t wear glitter and sequins, but they do strive toward ideals that are basically aesthetic, and for that reason they are harder to judge by simple criteria such as elapsed time (though speed is one of the criteria). To appreciate the performance requires initiation into an art form.
We had gained on the cars that started earlier, and now the show would begin in earnest. Two cars veered off onto an alternate path that ran to the side of the main track. I turned to see them chasing each other, sideways, perhaps twenty yards off to the right and on a trajectory that looked to intersect with ours. Thick plumes of white smoke billowed from under each car. Forrest looked off to the right as well, and slowed. Just before our paths met, the other cars shifted from starboard to port tack, weight shifted now to the left and yawing clockwise. Forrest accelerated, threw his car into a similar angle of attack, and fell in behind them seamlessly. Scratch that; “seamless” makes it sound like the outcome was assured, but in fact it was a moment of acute tension. It was like watching Bode Miller on the ragged edge of control in a downhill ski race—not on TV but while riding piggyback.
Now all three cars were sliding in rough, unstable unison, five to ten feet apart, through what I believed was a broad right-hand sweeper, though after the first moment of turn-in I couldn’t say for sure because the cabin had completely filled with tire smoke, and beyond the windshield was a solid, featureless white. Yet Forrest did not let off the gas. I had the sensation of yaw, but no visual cues whatsoever for perhaps four or five seconds. When the smoke cleared, we were going very fast. Forrest had been driving blind through the entire turn. There is a lot of trust among these rivals.
Our tandem drift reminded me of moments that would occur when I played pickup games of ice hockey in the 1990s, outdoors on Chicago’s Midway. Sometimes when the puck would ricochet off in a new direction I found myself leaning hard into a turn, banking in unison with two or three players (from whichever team—it didn’t matter at that moment) like fighter planes in formation. Each of us wanted that puck like a greyhound wants the bunny—and would have taken one another’s head off to get it. But on another level, what I felt was an intense love for the moving bodies who chased it with me. Together we did something beautiful to behold, and we knew it.
In Homo Ludens, his classic study of “the play element in culture,” Johan Huizinga wrote that play is marked by “a spirit of hostility and friendship combined.” He found this in sport; in ritualized combat; in the competitive dances, stylized insult trading and boasting matches of every culture that remains vital. I think this captures pretty well the social element of motor sport. Huizinga writes that “the human need to fight” is intimately connected to “the imperishable need of man to live in beauty. There is no satisfying this need save in play.”2
Play is common to all the higher animals. Huizinga writes, “We have only to watch young dogs to see that all the essentials of human play are present in their merry gambols. They invite one another to play by a certain ceremoniousness of attitude and gesture. They keep to the rule that you shall not bite, or not bite hard, your brother’s ear. They pretend to get terribly angry.”
If the sporting of dogs resembles human play, we may as well say the converse, that play expresses the “animal spirits” of man. As such it stands against the ideal of rational control that has become so pervasive in contemporary culture. “To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension—these are the essence of the play-spirit,” Huizinga writes. Thus understood, play answers to a very basic need. It may be the most serious thing we do. But it expresses a part of the soul that sits uncomfortably with the contemporary taste for order, and is therefore subject to censure as irresponsible (on safety grounds) or, because it is competitive, as a threat to the ethic of equal esteem.
When Teddy Roosevelt made a case for “the strenuous life” a century ago, and criticized the “mollycoddle” type that he saw proliferating, he spoke for an emerging “vitalist” tradition that meant to give the animal spirits their due. This line of thought responded to a creeping utilitarianism that seemed to be loosening the tension in the soul, unstringing the bow of action. In France, Henri Bergson spoke of “élan vital” as the decisive human quality. In Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote with contempt of “the last man,” that calculating creature who seeks only comfort, safety, and the “small pleasures” of the bourgeois. In the States, William James sought a “moral equivalent of war” that would preserve the quality of hardness in times of peace, because he judged it a cultural necessity. More recently, the movie Fight Club revived this strand of critique. It draws on intuitions that could be called neopagan, since the virtues it emphasizes are not the Christian ones of meekness and humility.
The rationalist looks with suspicion on those wellsprings of culture—play—that have no utilitarian justification. Play is superfluous. Because it serves no end beyond itself, it stands outside the calculus of means-ends reasoning. An episode of play interrupts the seeking that an acquisitive society is based on. Bounded within definite limits of time, often taking place in a playing field (or racetrack) set off from “the real world,” play presents an interlude, a pause in the endless deferment of joy that is daily life.
So far so good; one can well imagine the Montessori crowd nodding along with this endorsement of play. It is, after all, a cultural staple of ours to bemoan an overly structured and protected childhood. Yet it is the aspect of contest, the thirst for distinction, that Huizinga identifies as the crucial, civilizing element of play. This we are not so comfortable with; self-esteem is something to which all are equally entitled. Before returning to motor sport, I would like to offer a few thoughts on the psychology of rivalry in general, as I believe our determination to quarantine and suppress it in contemporary culture lies just beneath the surface of some of our difficulties.
PLAY AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIAL ORDER
Our aspiring nature connects us to other people through emulation. Emulation (I want to be like that person, not those self-satisfied people) gets you off the couch, but ultimately it is your better self that you feel you must answer to. What that better self might be capable of is something you have to discover, and the whole process is set in motion by watching other people and feeling the sting of rank.
Huizinga writes that “the competitive ‘instinct’ is not in the first place a desire for power or a will to dominate. The primary thing is the desire to excel others, to be the first and to be honoured for that.”3 This distinction between wanting to excel others and wanting to dominate others gets elided in egalitarian culture, and the thirst for distinction is thereby subject to all the suspicion that should be reserved for a would-be tyrant. The irony is that this clamp-down on the spirit of contest itself expresses a tyrannical need to control others.4 You see it in the playground minders of affluent progressive schools, for example, who monitor play for signs of incipient trauma to the fragile selves they are busy cultivating.
Since one purpose of this book is to consider the evolving means and ends of social control, we do well to remind ourselves that there is a long pedigree, going back to The Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, for the idea that democracy requires equal esteem, not merely equal rights or equal opportunity. A people whose energies of rivalry have been safely corralled into socially useful channels (economic productivity) will also be a people who are isolated from one another, and therefore easier to control.
Huizinga gives us reason to worry that this aspiration to control and flatten the lust for distinction ends up cannibalizing the real source of social order. The contest for honor gives rise to deference and trust among players, and on Huizinga’s account it is precisely here that we should look for the origins of institutions.5 Contests and games require rules, after all. Unlike the simple lust for power, they require that participants recognize the legitimacy of standards that aren’t simply emanations of their own will.
The sense of a world that is indifferent to you, and a capacity to accommodate yourself to it, is precisely what an infant lacks. The world revolves around him, and he experiences his mother as an omnipotent extension of his own will. Anything that thwarts his will is enraging. This is called infantile narcissism, in the Freudian schema.6 Let’s combine this nugget from Freud with what we have learned from Huizinga. The world does not love you simply for being you. But if you rise to its challenge, it may confer on you distinction of a public nature. One puts oneself up against others in a publicly visible fight for distinction, while submitting to the common rules of some established game. The ego and the superego need one another: there can be no well-founded pride without a corresponding capacity for self-disgust, and it is other people (and their rules of play) who provide the marks on this vertical scale.
To efface the scale or deny that it exists, in the name of egalitarian scruples, is to guarantee arrested development on a mass scale. This can take a number of forms, and I think we would do well to entertain a hybrid Freud-Huizinga perspective in trying to make sense of some contemporary manifestations of infantilism. Consider the sad ritual of mass shootings by young men who seem unable to conceive a way of making a mark on the world—of making themselves known to others—but through an eruption of solipsistic rage. He acts out a fantasy of omnipotence that has never come up against the civilizing resistance offered by other people. Such an action is the opposite of fighting and playing.
GENTLEMEN AT PLAY: MOTOR SPORT TO THE DEATH
In his canvas of archaic cultures, Huizinga finds that a fight to the death between two groups is often portrayed as an instance of playing. In one such fight (in the Hebrew Book of Samuel), the word used to describe the deadly contest is “taken from the sphere of laughter.” Greek vases depict armed contests accompanied by flute players, and at the Olympic games there were duels fought to the death.
A modern-day equivalent might be found at the Isle of Man TT motorcycle race, still taking place annually, in which it is routine for a few people to die each year. (It is full-bore road racing with speeds reaching 200 mph, but conducted on narrow public roads, many of them bounded by stone walls.) Such spectacles are sometimes lumped together with activities like bungee jumping or riding roller coasters. But mere thrill seeking is sterile, as are mere games of chance such as Russian roulette; they may induce a rush of adrenaline in the participant but are not productive of culture. As Huizinga writes, “The picture changes as soon as play demands application, knowledge, skill, courage and strength. The more ‘difficult’ the game the greater the tension in the beholders . . . . The more apt it is to raise the tone, the intensity of life in the individual or the group the more readily will it become part of civilization itself.”7
There is a gorgeous film about the most recent decade of MotoGP motorcycle racing, Hitting the Apex. It is narrated by Brad Pitt (one of the stars of Fight Club, as it happens). In it there is an interview with the team manager of Jorge Lorenzo, who has been one of the premier riders—a player, you might say—in this era. The manager says, “I have been fortunate. This is the message.” He indicates that his good fortune consists of being able to put himself in the service of something beautiful. “In the motorcycle world, anyone who falls, like Lorenzo or [Marc] Márquez, who races with broken bones, demonstrates that one can come back from injury to continue to breathe the intoxication of a dream . . . . We must share the scent of victory and make those around us happy by our example.” Players make those around them happy by their example: motor sport echoes the civilizing spectacle of archaic contest.
World War One saw the emergence of a new form of combat, the aerial dogfight, that might be regarded as a case of motor sport to the death. Its resemblance to archaic contest is singular when viewed against the backdrop of industrialized slaughter, which made its first appearance in that same conflict. To grasp the singularity of the dogfight, we also need to grasp the nature of the surrounding catastrophe.
The rapid mechanization of war toward the end of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth was repellant to those, of an aristocratic temper, for whom the aesthetics of war were crucial to the elevating social function they (still) believed war played. Further, the type of human being who is competent with machines, such a chauffeur, was seen to be of a lower order than the type who embodies the military ideal. Winston Churchill expressed these lingering prejudices in My Early Life, published in the early 1930s. He had been commissioned as a cavalry officer in 1895, serving in the Fourth Hussars, and in this passage he conveys a young gentleman’s view of war.
There is a thrill and charm of its own in the glittering jingle of a cavalry squadron manoeuvring at the trot; and this deepens into joyous excitement when the same evolutions are performed at a gallop. The stir of the horses, the clank of their equipment, the thrill of motion, the tossing plumes, the sense of incorporation in a living machine, the suave dignity of the uniform all combine to make cavalry drill a fine thing in itself . . . .
It is a shame that War should have flung all this aside in its greedy, base, opportunist march, and should turn instead to chemists in spectacles, and chauffeurs pulling the levers of aeroplanes or machine guns.8
Manfred von Richthofen was good with horses too. He was commissioned as a cavalry officer in 1911 and had a lovely life in his regiment, consisting of horse racing and jumping competitions as well as drills. Then the First World War broke out, in August 1914, and the gentleman was unceremoniously deposited at Verdun. This was not nearly so sporting. As the stalemate of a new sort of ground war set in, the cavalry had become obsolete overnight, and the horseman found himself in the trenches. We can imagine young Manfred looking up from the mud, the misery, the sheer impasse, and seeing a solo figure aloft, maneuvering with freedom.
He knew nothing about these newfangled aeroplanes and, like most officers, had held in contempt the men who operated them. But just look! The banking dives, the swooping lines of pursuit in three dimensions, sometimes descending to treetop level: two pilots playing out their deadly drama for all to see. The old prejudice crumbled, and Manfred von Richthofen put in for a transfer to the air service.
He got his first taste of aerial combat in the late summer of 1915. On September 17, his squadron encountered a formation of Allied planes, and Richthofen picked a Farman F.E.2b fighter-bomber as his target. This was a “pusher” biplane, with the propeller in the back, allowing the forward observer to fire a swiveling .303 machine gun as the pilot, seated behind and above, maneuvered the plane. Richthofen’s squadron dove out of the sun. It is reported of Richthofen that
his inexperience allowed the Allied observer to get off some dangerous bursts at him, but he finally managed to close in and riddle the belly of the Allied plane. He followed the crippled plane down to the ground and landed near it. He watched German soldiers lift the two mortally wounded British aviators from their cockpits. The observer, seeing Richthofen and recognizing him as the victor, acknowledged him with a smile before dying.9
As Richthofen’s first confirmed kill, this British flier could not have known that the victor he acknowledged would come to be known as the Red Baron, with eighty confirmed air victories. (The benchmark for being designated an “ace,” on both sides of the war, was five victories.)
What interests us is the smile. Perhaps that detail is an embellishment; it has a whiff of mythology about it. But myths are significant, as they point toward shared ideals. The dying aviator’s smile may be understood as a sublime instance of sportsmanship; he was not a sore loser. For the aerial dogfight has the quality of a deadly game, of precisely the sort Huizinga finds in archaic societies. Airmen would sometimes “drop challenges” behind enemy lines: an invitation to play.
Manfred von Richthofen finally met his match in Canadian Royal Air Force pilot Arthur Roy Brown, who pursued Richtofen as he in turn pursued another Canadian flier. The chase crossed over into Allied territory in France and the machine-gun nests of the Fifty-Third Battery, Australian Field Artillery. It is disputed who fired the shots that brought down the Red Baron. As one historian tells it, “Whether hit from the air or the ground, Richthofen was mortally wounded. He tore off his goggles, opened the throttle briefly, then cut off the engine and dipped down for a crash landing. His plane bounced once, breaking the propeller, and settled in a beet field . . . near Sailley-le-Sac. He died moments later. It was 10:50 a.m.”
What I find especially significant are the events of the following day:
Manfred von Richthofen was laid to rest late in the afternoon of April 22 in a small, unkempt cemetery in Bertangles. He was buried with full military honors after a short service by an Anglican chaplain. Twelve men from No. 3 Squadron, Australian Flying Corps, each fired three rounds into the air. Other officers placed wreaths on the grave. The body was set with feet facing the marker, a four-bladed propeller trimmed to form a cross.10
In the regard it expressed for a deadly enemy, this funeral is in the same spirit as the dying Englishman’s smile. In all play there is a play-community, and it stands apart from “the others” (for example, the French villagers who were incensed that a German was buried in their town and tried to dig up the body). When war is approached as a game, the humanity of one’s opponent is an indispensable premise. Indeed, more than being merely human, he must be a worthy adversary or the game is not worth playing. Play is inherently exclusive, and it follows that war understood in this way is necessarily limited. The principle of contest is violated in mass extermination, no less than it is in the ambush or the punitive expedition.11
If one were to force these little details—the smile, the funeral—to fit into the standard Marxist historiography of the First World War, it would go something like this: the elites of the combatant countries felt more allegiance to one another than to their own countrymen, therefore such gestures of politesse may be taken to express a class solidarity that trumped national loyalty. There is surely something to this; there were instances of officers from opposing armies meeting to play poker, by way of alleviating the crushing tedium of trench warfare (and perhaps, the crushing tedium of the company of their countrymen of lower rank).
But entry to the game of aerial combat was not tied to class distinctions, and indeed the undeniably noble character of this game posed a direct challenge to the prejudices of class. The youthful snobbery in Churchill’s dismissal of “chauffeurs pulling the levers of aeroplanes” would be nowhere evident in 1940 when Churchill, now prime minister, visited the RAF bunker at Uxbridge during the Battle of Britain on August 16: Upon leaving, “Churchill told General Hastings Ismay, ‘Don’t speak to me, I have never been so moved.’ After several minutes of silence he said, ‘Never in the history of mankind has so much been owed by so many to so few.’”12
In referring to “the few and the many,” Churchill invoked a timeless theme of politics. But these few, the RAF fighter pilots, were not drawn primarily from the higher ranks of British society.13 Yet they seemed to embody the aristocratic ideal of archaic warfare: contempt of death, expressed in single combat on behalf of a larger collective. The spirit of chivalry aspired to by the horse-born soldiers of Churchill’s youth had found unexpected expression amidst industrialized slaughter, from an unexpected class of people. Thus does civilization renew itself.